Female voices: peasant women in African cinema. Listen, translate and talk about Selbé et tant d'autres by Safi Faye

Abstract

The following text analyses the medium-length film Selbé et tant d'autres (1983) by the Senegalese filmmaker and ethnologist Safi Faye, which explores a counter-hegemonic look at the representation of female bodies in cinema and constructs its audiovisual narrative from an «emic/etic» perspective where the author herself oscillates on the border of observer/observed to situate herself as part of the context and the characters she shows. And contrary to Hito Steyrl's notion of «image-spam» - which responds to a capitalist logic of constructing aesthetic references aimed at promoting the material and immaterial consumption of invented needs - Faye articulates the image of the subjects represented through the dignification of their daily activities and distances herself from the Eurocentric narrative of showing ‘the African’ as exotic or savage and the African woman within colonialist parameters.